I had an experience at a university in a college where a very old professor was giving a guest lecture and happened to refer to past people he worked with by describing their physical appearance.
Now this is normal for older adults. They use mnemonic strategies. The prof literally described every single person he brought up. Yet one of these people was a good looking woman. She had been a grad student like 30 years ago and he said something like. “She was a very striking woman and had long hair”.
That’s it. Not "if I had been younger " or “all the other grads wanted to bang her”. Just that short simple remark.
A guy in my class lost his shit. Wanted this 75 year old esteemed professor fired.
Yes. Fired.
He got all the grad students who were in the class that day to sign a petition. They all signed. I refused. A woman, btw.
He tried to bully me to sign it. Him and few others cornered me in the hallway.
I said. “Listen dude. Ive experienced actual sexual discrimination. That wasn’t it.”. And I also pointed out that he should know, being a psych major, that it was obviously a mnemonic strategy to describe appearance because the prof did it for every person he mentioned. (Some were quite amusing).
This guy wouldn’t let it go.
After the prof made a public apology. Twice. This guy still wanted him fired. Eventually the dept chair came to the class and said basically. “Stfu. He’s not getting fired. He already apologized.”
To add more b.s to the story. A few weeks later. Same class. Different guest speaker (class had different one every week), this new guest speaker. A young hip charismatic professor. Joked about some guy being hot and him being distracted by it.
And the guy came off straight so it was like a joke. And that’s fine.
Except. The guy who was gunning for the professor to get fired, along with many other classmates were sitting there laughing and joking a long and I just sat there watching them all. Like. Wtf.
WTF is wrong with these fucking people.
This all went down my 2nd month of grad school.
You could say I was quite concerned I had chose the wrong university.
Also. The old professor. Yeah. Jew. Old Jew. You know that guy had to deal with real discrimination in his life. And then here he was being harassed over saying a woman from 30 years ago was beautiful.
This meme format can go right back where it came from.
tl;dr IMO
My annoyance are people who become progressive but remain blissfully unaware of their internalized racism and misogyny.
That shit doesn’t just fall out of your head when you decide your an ally; you have to work on it.
I’ve felt.this way as well. I think part of.the issue is.that the modern web doesn’t have many good places for deeper focus and enculturatuon vs. Shallow encounters with concepts a la tiktok
I think this is also a symptom of powerlessness. When it doesn’t feel like one can do anything to meaningfully change the world around themselves, some people fall back on policing the aesthetics of peers.
Also purple run-on sentence in front of an inexplicably selected portrait of a random person ostensibly meant to associate the problem described with people who look like them is a rather tired format… Would have been cooler as a text post, with punctuation. IMO.
I think it’s a bit assumptive to say the selected image is to “associate the problem described with people who look like [the person in the image]”
I’ve always interpreted the one in the image as the one voicing the problem in memes like this. Like, for all we know, it’s just a selfie of the one who made the meme originally.
It is indeed a bit presumptive. It could be much more well-meaning, or at least not meaning to have that interpretation. But without addressing it, it feels like a big weird elephant in the room.
Well, I think this run-on sentence is demoni- I mean, problematic.
I’ve been having an internal crisis this year that I feel is relevant to part if this.
I’ve spent my whole life dedicated to the idea that you can appreciate art in spite of the artist. My favorite author is Lovecraft, his long winded style with a mix of fluttering anxiety and dry academia is deeply relatable to me and while I understand the extreme xenophobia of his beliefs are foundational to how he conveys the horror of his writing, I find it hard to actually see that in the minds eye. When I read about a lost civilization of gorilla people in Africa and the man that took one as his wife, it’s not a coded fear of finding out you’re actually part black, it’s finding out your grandma was banging Gorilla Grod and that’s why you have this much hair.
I was content with this. One can find meaning in art without agreeing with the artist. I’d even go as far as to say we should engage with art like this. A tree without the thrashing of the breeze does not have the roots to support its lofty reach. Like the tree, we must have our convictions and views tested to break those that don’t serve us and strengthen those that do, lest we find ourselves in the ire of this image’s creator as someone who condemns an art for daring to tax our roots.
However, even the taproot of this belief strains under the weight of the gales that are the Epstein situation. So much of the media that I once championed for daring to depict what I read as benal inclusion are shadowed in doubt now. Everyone knows the scene from IT, but when I read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by King, I found it’s inclusion of bathroom activities added to the realism. Shitting your guts out because you drank raw stream water isn’t often detailed in survival stories. Knowing now that King was on the island, the details description of how to piss in the woods as a 12 year old girl, or the cooling comfort of washing her ass in the stream after her explosive ordeal, I have to question whether it’s there for realism or there because he couldn’t justify a gang rape of this character like he could in IT.
It doesn’t stop there. Actors, directors, painters, writers, TV producers, animators, Evey time I take a closer look I find the rebel that dared was not making a bold assertion against the status quo, they were just using their position to make more pornography for themselves. Kricfalusi wasn’t making a statement with Ren and Stimpy, he was half assing a cartoon while extorting two teenagers into being sex pets. Nickelodeon knew, they didn’t care because most of the people responsible for my childhood were using their positions to fuck the children I looked up to. Bakshi didn’t care when he hired Kricfalusi either and now I have to wonder if Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic are the bold critiques of societal wrong or just a fury porno and racism pretending to be intellectuals.
At some point, I think we do have to draw a line, and the more I uncover, the more I find that it would have been justified to put down the media when I felt icky about it.
I think it’s okay to like a shitty person’s art as long as they are dead.
That seems fair.
But I won’t give my money to shitty people still alive.
Art is art. What art means is entirely up to the audience to determine regardless of the original intention of the author.
All of those stories are still the stark social commentary you originally interpreted it to be. Your analysis of the art is still valid regardless of the author’s original intent. They still made you question things and feel those emotions. Just because the author is a piece of shit doesn’t take that away from you or make that experience any less valid.
Welcome to the real test of “separating the art from the artist”.
I guess i was just raised that raping children was bad and im looking at my society like “but everyone thinks it’s fine or something? As long as you dont admit it??”.
Was Kendrick Lamar correct that Drake was raping minors?? If not, shouldn’t he be forced to apologize at least? If true, why isn’t Drake in prison so he doesn’t hurt children anymore?? Everyone just kinda forgot about it???
Take it from someone who has been struggling with the reality that some of the most moving pieces of work are written by terrible people for a very long time, and are deeply infested with troubling views of their depravity, it does not in fact get better. That doesn’t mean there aren’t useful things that can be salvaged from the train-wreck of their work, you just have to be careful how invest in your relationship with that work.
At one point the devs of Spec Ops: The Line said something that has stuck with me: “putting the game down and walking away is a valid form of engagement”.
I accept that for media, and that’s actually a solid stance from the developers. I’m just struggling with the ubiquity of it all. The island of what I haven’t put down is getting too small to walk away on.
Been unsure how to phrase this, so.
I think it’s possible to enjoy the art of a problematic artist on its own merits. What I don’t particularly like is the hero worship that permeates society and gives problematic artists platforms for their shittiness. The Ed Sheeran thing comes to mind. Dude is known for playing mediocre guitar and singing songs I don’t listen to. I don’t expect deep geopolitical insights from guitar man. I understand people that would take offense at his stance, which to me came across as someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about it at all and ignored the pleas of his PR team telling him to keep his mouth shut.
The Epstein thing is obviously worse, but we also don’t know the details of that either. Epstein wasn’t an idiot, he schmoozed with everybody, not just the people that paid him to procure children. Did King participate in the pedophilia, or did he just go on vacation to a private island? One of those things is a problem that should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, and the other is very suspect in retrospect. There was a dude I went to school with who I was friends with for a bit who, about a year after I last talked to him, beat someone half to death and stole their car. Went to jail for it. Does that make me a shitty person? Probably not? Maybe not a great judge of character, but I wasn’t there for the beating nor the theft.
Also, people can change and grow with time. Again, that’s not an excuse to not prosecute King if he was involved in pedophilia, but if he was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s much harder to declare him a lifelong Bad Dude ™. Maybe he had Epstein read a manuscript and Epstein was like “nah man, that’s not what a 12 year old girl peeing sounds like”.
Edit: I was rewatching firefly the other day, and a line from the jaynestown episode comes to mind: “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
Nobody was talking about pedophiles, yeah draw the line there thats fine.
One thing that might help you is for you to make something. That way you know at least one thing wasn’t made by a sex monster for fucked up reasons. If doesn’t even have to be good, but it does help to create. Then realizing there’s a lot of things out there like that, which were made by people who weren’t pieces of shit for piece of shit reasons, and take solace in that.
That’s actually very close to how I’ve been coping. I’m a very versatile DIY type and I’ve been slowly retrofitting jailbroken and FOSS tech into mid century designs as a means of chasing a world that didn’t sell it’s soul as penny stocks.
That is all one sentence isn’t it
No, but it’s written as one.
I could feel my brain shriveling as I was reading it.
Protestant thought patterns.
Demons, well known for caring about the environment and equitable civil rights
Historically… Yea actually. Pagans loved and worshiped nature and were pretty egalitarian compared to the Christian empires which forced an oppressive, patriarchal hierarchy.
The divine is disgusting.
who do you mean with pagans? It’s an exonym so do you mean everyone who is not a christian? Because that is an easy bar to pas, since history has been long and religions have been many. Did you have a specific culture in mind?
Edit: The point I wanted to get to, is that if we start looking around at historical cultural/religious practices around the world, it won’t take you long to find pretty questionable practices (from a contemporary humanist perspective) including all of the things you mentioned both in and outside of Christianity
Edit: You know what, you probably already know all of this, I guess the word pagans just tripped me up. Have a good night haha.
semantics
Hang on, I’m not saying I have any evidence or experience with what OP’s image is about… but I have a strong feeling you didn’t actually read the words. Read the words. Every word, not just a skim for keywords.
It’s not saying the left is demonic. It’s not saying anything about climate change. It’s not even being critical of the left itself.
It’s saying there are people who use left-coded language because it’s the language of their culture, but that these people are still operating on moral purity standards. It’s saying these people will dislike something that doesn’t align with their moral purity, but rather than using the language of religion and calling it demonic, they instead use the language of their inclusivity culture and call it problematic, but it’s the same thing.
That’s what this post is about. I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t encounter these people myself, but it’s still what it’s about. I have to assume you read the word left at the top, slid your eyes down the page to the end where it said demon and were like “wow, I’ve got a take for this!” 😛
…read the words. every word…
The one sentence? I read the entire one sentence.
That’s what this post is about.
Yea no shit, that’s why I contextually responded to it.
I have to assume…
You don’t have to assume anything.
Okay, our wires must be crossed, because I have no idea how the thing you said is related to the thing I read, but maybe that’s on me! 😉
checks out
Leftist mysticism notwithstanding, I’ll take pseudoscience over raw religious absurdity any day. At least the ideas seem relatable to real concepts, like techno-babble. God is such an intentionally broad and purposefully mysterious concept so as to be essentially unknowable.
> pseudoscience
> raw religious absurdity
I never said I liked either of them, I just said I preferred one to the other. The difference is, I absolutely despise one and the other is merely tolerable to me, if just as harmful.
In the end, I don’t think anyone cares about the difference or my opinion anyways, they’d rather just have something to hate, details-be-damned. Not very thoughtful or scientific is it?
seems relatable to real concepts, like techno-babble
They is truly lost in the sauce.
You never watched Star Trek?
Missing the point
I understand that the point is to hate on sophistry, I merely offered an opinion, not support.
